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Penitenziagite

Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Penitenziagite

"Penitenziagite! Watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! Death is super nos! Pray the Santo Pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! Ha ha, you like this negromanzia de Domini Nostri Jesu Christi! Et anco jois m'es dols e plazer m'es dolors... Cave el diabolo! Semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. But Salvatore is not stupidus! Bonum monasterium, and aqui refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. And the resto is not worth merda. Amen. No?"
As this story continues, I shall have to speak again, and at length, of this creature and record his speech. I confess I find it very difficult to do so because I could not say now, as I could never understand then, what language he spoke. It was not Latin, in which the lettered men of the monastery expressed themselves, it was not the vulgar tongue of those parts, or any other I had ever heard. I believe I have given a faint idea of his manner of speech, reporting just now (as I remember them) the first words of his I heard. When I learned later about his adventurous life and about the various places where he had lived, putting down roots in none of them, I realized Salvatore spoke all languages, and no language. Or, rather, he had invented for himself a language which used the sinews of the languages to which he had been exposed—and once I thought that his was, not the Adamic language that a happy mankind had spoken, all united by a single tongue from the origin of the world to the Tower of Babel, or one of the languages that arose after the dire event of their division, but precisely the Babelish language of the first day after the divine chastisement, the language of primeval confusion. Nor, for that matter, could I call Salvatore's speech a language, because in every human language there are rules and every term signifies ad placitum a thing, according to a law that does not change, for man cannot call the dog once dog and once cat, or utter sounds to which a consensus of people has not assigned a definite meaning, as would happen if someone said the word "blitiri." And yet, one way or another, I did understand what Salvatore meant, and so did the others. Proof that he spoke not one, but all languages, none correctly, taking words sometimes from one and sometimes from another. I also noticed afterward that he might refer to something first in Latin and later in Provençal, and I realized that he was not so much inventing his own sentences as using the disiecta membra of other sentences, heard some time in the past, according to the present situation and the things he wanted to say, as if he could speak of a food, for instance, only with the words of the people among whom he had eaten that food, and express his joy only with sentences that he had heard uttered by joyful people the day when he had similarly experienced joy. His speech was somehow like his face, put together with pieces from other people's faces, or like some precious reliquaries I have seen (si licet magnis componere parva, if I may link diabolical things with the divine), fabricated from the shards of other holy objects.

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

No Real Choice

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

No Real Choice

...The basic point is that competition may result merely in the mutual luring away of each others' customers on the part of a group of competing firms; and that to this extent competition and product diversification is wasteful and diversionary especially when, in its absence, consumers would either be able to bring more effective pressures upon management toward product improvement or would stop using up their energies in a futile search for the "ideal" product.
It will be immediately evident that competitive political systems have frequently been portrayed in just these terms. Radical critics of societies with stable party systems have often denounced the competition of the dominant parties as offering "no real choice." It is of course a very open question whether, in the absence of the competitive party system, citizens would be better able to achieve fundamental social and political changes (assuming, for the sake of the argument, that such changes are desirable).
Nevertheless the radical critique is correct in pointing out that competitive political systems have a considerable capacity to divert what might otherwise be a revolutionary ground swell into tame discontent with the governing party. Although this capacity may normally be an asset, one can surely conceive of circumstances under which it would turn into a liability.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Slack

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Slack

Quite a different reaction to the discovery of slack occurs when the discoverer asks himself, after having got over his initial shock, whether slack may not after all be a good thing, a blessing in disguise.
The idea that slack fulfills some important, if unintended or latent, functions was put forth by Cyert and Marsh, who point out that it permits firms to ride out adverse market or other developments. During such bad times slack acts like a reserve that can be called upon: excess costs will be cut, innovations that were already within one's grasp will at last be introduced, more aggressive sales behavior that had been shunned will now be engaged in, and so on.
Slack in the political system has been rationalized in a very similar manner. The discovery that citizens do not normally use more than a fraction of their political resources came originally as a surprise and disappointment to political scientists who had been brought up to believe that democracy requires for its functioning the fullest possible participation of all citizens. But soon enough a degree of apathy was found to have some compensating advantages in as much as it contributes to the stability and flexibility of a political system and provides for "reserves" of political resources which can be thrown into the battle in crisis situations.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Continuity

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Continuity

The reason for which humans have failed to develop a finely built social process assuring continuity and steady quality in leadership is probably that they did not have to. Most human societies are marked by the existence of a surplus beyond subsistence. The counterpart of this surplus is society's ability to take considerable deterioration in its stride. A lower level of performance, which would mean disaster for baboons, merely causes discomfort, at least initially, to humans.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States

Dumpster

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Dumpster

One day, when my son John came home from preschool, he had a new friend in his backpack. His name was Pilly, and he was a small blue-and-yellow pillow.

His mother and I were not sure that Pilly was actually intended to be a child's plaything. It's possible that Pilly was a dog toy. Pilly must've belonged to another child, but we asked around and no one ever claimed him.

It's a good thing, too, because John and Pilly were inseparable. When I put him to bed at night, he always had Pilly with him, snuggled against his cheek. He grew older and bought many, many new stuffies, and he always rubbed them against his cheek to see how they'd feel when hugging. He got a number of rabbits, a Creeper and a Skeleton from Minecraft, stuffed Peeps bunnies, Squishmallows, those little guys you turn inside out, sharks from aquariums, pachyderms from zoos and Disney World, Pokémon of every size and shape and generation.

He's 16 now, and still loves his stuffed animals and, as I've said to anyone who'll listen, I love that he loves stuffed animals. He's a beautiful human being, a compassionate and funny and thoughtful young man, and a much better son than I deserve.

This has been an interesting week. As part of our intended move to France in 2028, I rented a dumpster to get rid of as much stuff as we possibly could. This can be emotionally difficult. My mother grew up in poverty. Her home burned down when she was in high school and she lost everything. My father died just after I turned 11 and left her a single mother of two. She values possessions, even small things, in a way that can make other people uncomfortable.

I haven't had that issue, but a slightly different one. I think I tried to build and maintain an emotional distance between my son and me, so that he would not be devastated when I died. I kept my self emotionally locked down, at various levels, because I was deeply afraid of that eventuality.

Did I act rationally to maintain or improve my health, to provide for my family in the event of my death, etc? Well, no, I acted with fear and selfishness. I distanced myself, I minimized the surface of contact, I outsourced companionship and entertainment and emotional engagement. I was about as remote as I could be, for a guy who was always physically in the house.

And I had a lot of hobbies, all of which cost a substantial amount of money and few of which brought me genuine longterm fulfillment. One in particular, homelabbing, enabled me to become a decent engineer.

So the past few days have involved me going through the house and preparing to sell or donate or discard a massive amount of personal possessions, primarily tied to hobbies I've had. And of course, as I did this, as I encountered some widget or book or musical instrument or miniature or plant or aquarium fixture or whatever, I had to think: that's $5, or $15, or $50, that could've stayed in my pocket. And though I've never made a FAANG salary, I've made good enough money for the past few years that we should be better off than we are.

In addition to the guilt, there's a significant amount of physical pain in my joints, from rheumatoid arthritis. I think my joints may have been deteriorating more quickly lately, as I approach my 46th birthday - the one my father didn't reach. So I pick up a few things, I throw them out, and I have to rest. Thursday night was awful; I tossed and turned, my knees on fire. Friday night was worse.

Yesterday, I came up from downstairs. My wife informed me that she and John had gone through his room and bagged up most - not all - of his stuffed animals. She showed me a picture of him, 16, with Pilly, because he'd agreed to give Pilly away.

I broke down immediately. It's the only time I've cried in front of my wife, in now over twenty years of marriage. It's the only time I've cried in front of another person as an adult. It was completely unexpected, and it felt amazing.

They filled up nine 30-gallon trash bags with stuffies, and that didn't count the eight big guys that were too large to economically fit in trash bags. I have Pilly on the table next to me. The rest went to a local organization that works with single mothers.

Ideas

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ideas

There are a dozen different metaphors we use colloquially to describe good ideas: we call them sparks, flashes, lightbulb moments; we have brainstorms and breakthroughs, eureka moments and epiphanies. Something about the concept pushes our language into rhetorical overdrive, our verbiage straining to reproduce the innovation it describes.

And yet, florid as they are, none of these metaphors captures what an idea actually is, on the most elemental level.

A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons–thousands of them–fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind. This is true whether the idea in question is a new way to solve a complex physics problem, or a closing line for a novel, or a feature for a software application. If we're going to try to explain the mystery of where ideas come from, we'll have to start by shaking ourselves free of this common misconception: an idea is not a single thing. It is more like a swarm.

Steven Berlin Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

A Series of Defeats

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Series of Defeats

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

— George Orwell

I finished Level Four of Pimsleur's French yesterday, and celebrated by listening to four episodes of InnerFrench, buying some French DELF/TCF books, and starting Level Five today. I understood much more of the InnerFrench - not quite 100%, but enough that I could follow it quite handily. Great sign, I think.

I finished a jigsaw puzzle last night - normally not something particularly challenging, but this one was without a picture of the completed puzzle to work from. It was fun.

My R720's ZFS pool is degraded after a disk failure. I resilvered with a spare, but another drive failed in the process. I had one other spare, and it's not working at all. I can't really be arsed to buy another, so... things might get spicy. I might relocate a drive from another machine (I have two NASes as well), or I might relocate those files. I just don't really know. But it's running, at present.

I deployed a change into production this morning, a major change that I've spent many weeks working on alone. I didn't see any increased error rate or other issues - in fact, a substantial decrease in errors. But I won't declare victory until probably a week has come and gone without complaint.

I had a frustrating experience practicing math today - managed to botch a few simple operations and get wrong answers. I took a break, though, and the second stretch went far better.

My son is going off to watch a play this evening - for fun.

It's shaping up to be a lovely evening - a little thunder, some rain, and the grass is a beautiful green when it's overcast during the golden hour.

Heraclitus

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Heraclitus

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

— Callimachus, Epigram 2

I Saw the TV Glow

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I Saw the TV Glow

I watched this last Saturday and haven't been able to get it out of my mind for long.

I'm not transgender. I'm not gay or bisexual. I'm a little less clear on whether I'm male; I've never really been comfortable in my own skin, but I'm not sure whether that indicates that I'm nonbinary or just not particularly good at performing masculinity. I grew up in a place with really prescriptive gender roles that I didn't quite fit, but I felt the roles were stupid, so 🤷🏻

I bring this up because some films like I Saw the TV Glow do seem very resonant for me, particularly what director Jane Schoenbrun said:

The tension between the space that you exist within, which feels like home, and the simultaneous terror and liberation of understanding that that space might not be able to hold you in your true form.

Or, as someone on BlueSky said:

"you just failed at being a man" no, being a man failed me. I upgraded my earthly vessel because the man-shell wasn't strong enough to contain my power, and was beginning to corrode.

I don't believe this is so much a "trans" or "nonbinary" thing as it is perhaps a neurodivergent thing, where I think some of us tend to wonder if we're space aliens or noncorporeal beings trapped in a human body. It reminds me of something William S. Burroughs Jr. said in Speed:

“Brian looked up to me; he said I moved like a cat, and when someone says that about you, you can be pretty sure they’re on your side. Everybody has a personal spell that they alone can cast, call it personality if you will, but it can become quite magical. Some people are sensitive to that magic and are easily taken. I am like that, I am constantly having to free myself from people after the initial beauty of their magic has led me to befriend them. Deep Southern gas station attendants with their friendly punches good-bye and their greasy gorilla hands. But then once I am close enough to them to talk freely it’s “Smell that finger, boy, I got in her pants in ten minutes.”

I read this as a feeling of alienation from, and deep discomfort with, the culture and behavior of the young men around him. I don't think that implies that he would've been any more comfortable in a prep school, or in a religious community, than bumming around trying to score paregoric or amphetamine. I think he was just uncomfortable being human, and I identify with that.

Maybe his father felt the same. He barely seemed human to me...

Today while exercising, my son and I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation S03E16, "The Offspring", in which Data creates an android child named Lal. Lal gets to choose their own body and gender. My kid nodded approvingly, though we were a little amused by the idea that you had to pick a gender, and that gender choice was permanent. TNG was incredibly, laudably progressive for its time, but not that progressive.

And of course Data and Lal have resonances for some people on the autism spectrum.

I'm very happy I get to share this show with him. And hopefully soon he'll watch I Saw the TV Glow with me too.

Central Planning

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Central Planning

Ironically, as a number of contemporary critics have observed, the fixation on quantifiable goals so central to metric fixation -- though often implemented by politicians and policymakers who proclaim their devotion to capitalism -- replicates many of the intrinsic faults of the Soviet system.

Just as Soviet bloc planners set output targets for each factory to produce, so do bureaucrats set measurable performance targets for schools, hospitals, police forces, and corporations. And just as Soviet managers responded by producing shoddy goods that met the numerical targets set by their overlords, so do schools, police forces, and businesses find ways of fulfilling quotas with shoddy goods, or downgrading grand theft auto to misdemeanor-level petty larceny, or opening dummy accounts for bank clients.

Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics

McLuhan

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan... elucidated the ways our technologies at once strengthen and sap us. In one of the most perceptive, if least remarked, passages in Understanding Media, McLuhan wrote that our tools end up "numbing" whatever part of our body they "amplify." When we extend some part of ourselves artificially, we also distance ourselves from the amplified part and its natural functions.

When the power loom was invented, weavers could manufacture far more cloth during the course of a workday than they'd been able to make by hand, but they sacrificed some of their manual dexterity, not to mention some of their "feel" for fabric. Their fingers, in McLuhan's terms, became numb.

Farmers, similarly, lost some of their feel for the soil when they began using mechanical harrows and plows. Today's industrial farm worker, sitting in his air-conditioned cage atop a gargantuan tractor, rarely touches the soil at all—though in a single day he can till a field that his hoe-wielding forebear could not have turned in a month.

When we're behind the wheel of our car, we can go a far greater distance than we could cover on foot, but we lose the walker's intimate connection to the land.

...

In explaining how technologies numb the very faculties they simplify, to the point even of "autoamputation", McLuhan was not trying to romanticize society as it existed before the invention of maps or clocks or power looms. Alienation, he understood, is an inevitable byproduct of the use of technology. Whenever we use a tool to exert greater control over the outside world, we change our relationship with the world. Control can be wielded only from a psychological distance.

In some cases, alienation is precisely what gives a tool its value. We build houses and sew Gore-Tex jackets because we want to be alienated from the wind and the rain and the cold. We build public sewers because we want to maintain a healthy distance from our own filth. Nature isn't our enemy, but neither is it our friend.

McLuhan's point was that an honest appraisal of any new technology, or of progress in general, requires a sensitivity to what's lost as well as what's gained. We shouldn't allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we've numbed an essential part of our self.

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Pancake People

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pancake People

I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. And such multi-faceted evolved personalities did not hesitate – especially during the final period of “Romanticism-Modern” – to cut down, like lumberjacks, large forests of previous achievement in order to heroically stake new claim to the ancient inherited land – this was the ploy of the avant-garde.

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.” A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance – as we all become “pancake people” – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment of “super-consciousness”? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so – and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.

Richard Foreman

Phaedrus

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Phaedrus

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts.

But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.

Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

PHAEDRUS: Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country.

Plato, Phaedrus

LLMs and Decay

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

LLMs and Decay

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

I've had mixed feelings about LLMs since I first started using them, with ChatGPT 3.0 or something. I won't claim to have felt anything new - just scroll down any social media app and you'll see other expressions. I've felt everything from awe to terror to contempt to amusement to defiance, etc.

I think I need to stop using them. That's not a particularly easy decision to make. Or, rather, it's easy in the same way that it's easy to decide to eat right and to exercise. The follow-through is somewhat more difficult. The sound of "LLM go brr" is really satisfying for a guy like me who tends to have much more inspiration than time in which to write things.

They make me dumber, and I can't afford to be dumber. A few weeks back, I needed to do something in a repository and got an error back from Claude Code. I don't remember the error - exhausted usage plan, random 500, whatever - but it errored. And I thought, "well, shit, now I can't [do the thing]." And I sat there and I started to wait, and then I realized... I knew how to [do the thing] myself. It was a trivial series of commands. And I was more than a little horrified, and ashamed of myself, and not for the first time.

I'm already concerned about my attention span. I'm prone to doomscrolling, and sometimes I'll do it for hours. I don't know if it's depression or ADHD or what. But if I'm not doomscrolling, it's likely that I'm tabbing back and forth between instances of Claude Code, doing a bunch of things that create a lot of lines of code but that I don't really learn that much from.

And I need to be learning. I intend to move to France in 2028. I intend to be a damn sight more attractive to employers in France than I am now. And failing that, a damn sight more attractive to employers aux États-Unis. Or some other country. Farting around with little proofs-of-concept hasn't really done a whole lot for me so far, and I don't think it's likely to do much for me in the future.

You might suspect that I've been waiting a while to write this post, and that's true. It's part of the core premise behind this blog, which is "Nug Doug: Doing Better." Reading more books and thinking more about what I'm reading. Practicing writing in French (even though, I have to admit, I have used LLMs to check my work there. I'm not really sure of a good alternative). Relearning mathematics conscientiously.

So what's my new approach? Work doesn't change. My employer actually explicitly demands I "default to AI". So this can't be a total break, which makes any kind of change substantially more difficult to achieve. But personally, I still have control.

Well, I'm trying to spend less time programming outside work, for one. We'll see how that goes. But I'm also renewing my LeetCode subscription and practicing DSA.

LeetCode?! I hear you cry in dismay. Yes, LeetCode-ish coding interviews are stupid. But I've found that I actually really enjoy LeetCode. There are no libraries. There's no frontend. There's no CI or CD. There're no tickets, no planning, no prioritization, no meetings, no code review. There's just me, a problem statement, and the syntax and semantics of the language at hand. It's completely unlike actual engineering, and so is actually really refreshing. If I enjoy Wordle, Clues by Sam, logic puzzles, etc, why wouldn't I like LeetCode?

And some dumbass companies still use it as a hiring thing, so it ends up seeming mildly fiscally responsible as well.

Chiron

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Chiron

Everyone understands how praiseworthy it is in a Prince to keep faith, and to live uprightly and not craftily. Nevertheless, we see from what has taken place in our own days that Princes who have set little store by their word, but have known how to overreach men by their cunning, have accomplished great things, and in the end got the better of those who trusted to honest dealing.

Be it known, then, that there are two ways of contending, one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the former of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. A Prince should, therefore, understand how to use well both the man and the beast. And this lesson has been covertly taught by the ancient writers, who relate how Achilles and many others of these old Princes were given over to be brought up and trained by Chiron the Centaur; since the only meaning of their having for instructor one who was half man and half beast is, that it is necessary for a Prince to know how to use both natures, and that the one without the other has no stability.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

My Difficult Relationship With Mathematics

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My Difficult Relationship With Mathematics

Shortly before saving and publishing the first draft of this post, I realized I wasn't being honest. It's not like I took a vow of honesty prior to starting this blog, but... this is something I need to be truthful about.

I recently took some time off from working through calculus again on Math Academy ¹. Well, okay, three months. And yesterday I mentally slumped in defeat, returned to the site, and took the placement exam.

I said "mentally slumped in defeat," but that's not right. I fucked up, and yesterday, I admitted it on some level. But subconsciously. I slumped in abject shame. This blog post is the rest of that admission, the conscious and public part.

The placement exam told me I needed to do large chunks of calculus again. I knew that. Because I fucked up.

My first draft centered, as the title might suggest, on my history with mathematics in an educational setting. TL;DR: It was bad. Bad enough that I'm not entirely sure how I graduated high school. Bad enough that it took me three or four tries (I can't remember for sure) to pass Calculus. Bad enough that I still doubt whether I really earned my grade in my Applied Statistics for Engineers class, the last and most challenging math class of my Computer Science degree.

I don't remember a time when I ever paid attention in class. I have ADHD. And I've blamed ADHD, and blamed my mother and my teachers and the school district for not having me tested. But my son has ADHD, and he still gets his books out and tries to do his homework. I never did that. My son, at sixteen, with additional learning challenges I never had, is far ahead of where I was at his age. And is probably far ahead of where I am now.

I started using Math Academy last year as part of my midlife crisis. Basically, I've decided that I'm not living up to my potential, the same conclusion that everyone around me reached when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. And I was benefiting a lot from it, and then, as we've established, I fucked up.

How did I fuck up? I focused on speed rather than comprehension. I avoided reading. I avoided writing down laws, theorems, formulae, and derivations. And I cheated.

I started cheating by double-checking my answers using online tools before I submitted them. The goal was to prevent re-work, since Math Academy penalizes wrong answers by assigning extra problems. I allowed a couple of questionable cases, where the wording wasn't perfect or a validation function was a little too strict, to take over my mind, to make me resentful, to view the relationship as oppositional rather than collaborative.

I set goals for myself in terms of points per day. This meant that, if I got a question wrong and missed the bonus points for that lesson or review, I viewed that as time stolen from me. So I felt justified in double-checking my answers so that as little time would be "stolen" from me as possible.

The next step was to look up things on the fly. If I forgot a cosine law, or the product law, or whatever, I would flip back to that section. Math Academy makes this straightforward. But you can't do that during a university exam. You can't do it during an interview. And I shouldn't've allowed myself to do it, not without acknowledging that it is problematic and taking additional steps to correct the problem, i.e. doing additional problems to build understanding.

I started cheating on quizzes, too; because if you get a question wrong on the quiz, you get extra review assignments to complete about the questions you got wrong. I viewed that as more time being taken from me, rather than the logically necessary additional practice that my mistakes and lack of comprehension warranted. "What's the point of quizzes?" I asked, though I knew the answer.

Shortly after that started, I became discouraged. It was a struggle to keep going. I didn't feel like I was learning anything anymore. And so I stopped doing it at all.

Is that just about the stupidest thing you've ever heard? It's really, really stupid, and I'm deeply ashamed of it.

I started smoking cigarettes when I was 19, and mostly quit (with a few brief, occasional lapses) when I was 31. I haven't smoked a cigarette in several years now. I'm very proud of that fact. But I'm also deeply, deeply ashamed of things I did and said when I was trying and failing to quit smoking. I did foul, disgusting things for the feeling that nicotine gave me.

But it's not just nicotine... I'm willing to lie to myself about all sorts of things to make myself feel better. I'll make any excuse. I'll take any out. I'll cut any corner. I still try to avoid discomfort, and I'll lie to myself or anyone around me to do so.

So now I have to back up quite a bit and do some things over again, and this time do it right. It's kind of the story of my life at this point.

Although I have my complaints about Math Academy, I think the value provided by the site is top-notch, and one of the things that makes it so valuable is that the placement exams are lengthy and fairly fine-grained, and that I don't have to spend too much time going over material that I do understand fairly well. ↩

Chary

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Chary

Word of the Day: chary /ˈCHerē/ cautiously or suspiciously reluctant to do something.

There is a too common tendency to regard history as a specialist subject; that is the primary mistake. For, on the contrary, history is the essential corrective to all specialisation. Viewed aright, it is the broadest of studies, embracing every aspect of life. It lays the foundation of education by showing how mankind repeats its errors and what those errors are.

B. H. Liddell Hart, Why Don't We Learn From History?

Vacuum

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Vacuum

The Taoists claimed that the comedy of life could be made more interesting if everyone would preserve the unities. To keep the proportion of things and give place to others without losing one's own position was the secret of success in the mundane drama. We must know the whole play in order to properly act our parts; the conception of totality must never be lost in that of the individual. This Laotse illustrates by his favorite metaphor of the Vacuum. He claimed that only in vacuum lay the truly essential. The reality of a room, for instance, was to be found in the vacant space enclosed by the roof and walls, not in the roof and walls themselves. The usefulness of a water pitcher dwelt in the emptiness where water might be put, not in the form of the pitcher of the material of which it was made. Vacuum is all potent because all containing. In vacuum alone motion becomes possible. One who could make of himself a vacuum into which others might freely enter would become master of all situations. The whole can always dominate the part.

Kakuza Okakura, The Book of Tea

Value

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Value

Hide yourself under a bushel quickly, for if your real usefulness were known to the world you would soon be knocked down to the highest bidder by the public auctioneer. Why do men and women like to advertise themselves so much? Is it not but an instinct derived from the days of slavery?

Kakuza Okakura, The Book of Tea

Theatre

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Theatre

Last year, or the year before, IDK, I had the idea of a swarm of autonomous agents that would live in my Goldentooth minilab. I didn't end up actually getting very far with the implementation, but I was far from the only person thinking along those lines, as OpenClaw has shown.

I've now implemented something a bit along those lines in theatre, which is a nursery for agents. They start out as wisps or husks, something like Miriam's former lovers in The Hunger, and have to accrete gradually over the course of many wake cycles.

An interesting thing was that, while working on this, I came across @void.comind.network, which led me to comind. The concepts I'd already thought through for representing different layers of personality accumulation mapped pretty much 1:1 with its system, and so I thought it would be good to integrate the two.

Nebhos is the first... character? wisp? husk? in theatre. Check it out if you're interested!